Conducted by Marty Mulvihill, UC Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry and the American Chemical Society, Green Chemistry Institute. This half-day workshop will introduce the concepts of green chemistry, show real-world examples, and make the business case for green chemistry. Learn about safer chemical alternatives, metrics for comparing the “greenness” of chemicals and processes; and resources available from ACS GCI and WA State Department of Ecology. The course will provide examples of practical tools for implementing green chemistry practices.

This presentation will explore how the principles of green chemistry can be applied to the development of sustainable nanotechnology. Both nanotechnology and green chemistry have promised to do more with less and have been driven by innovation. Proponents of both technologies promise to address the needs of a growing global population. Nanotechnology has promised advances in catalysis, energy production, and human health by harnessing the novel properties of materials that occur at the nanoscale. Green chemistry has promised to address many of the same challenges by minimizing the adverse health effects of chemicals while maximizing the efficiency of their production. My presentation aims to highlight an approach to nanotechnology that integrates the principles of green chemistry. Examples will include the design and synthesis of nanomaterials, the development of an arsenic sensor, and studies examining the environmental fate of engineered nanoparticles. These case studies exemplify an approach to nanotechnology that promotes innovative solutions and collaborative approaches to problem solving.

Conducted by Marty Mulvihill, UC Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry and the ACS Green Chemistry Institute. This half-day advanced workshop will delve more deeply into case studies and tools of green chemistry. This course will be interactive and steered by dialogue among attendees. Attendees should have a basic understanding of green chemistry, the principles of green chemistry, industrial applications and metrics for determining the greenness of chemicals OR attendance at Green Chemistry 101.

October 24

At the time of the 1855 treaties when the tribes and bands that are now the Yakama Nation, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and the Nez Perce Tribe, ceded millions of acres in return for promises that included the right to take fish at all usual and accustomed place, the tribes did not anticipate the industrial development that would pollute their waters and consequently their food sources with toxic substances. Tribes today are working together to protect their rights to clean and healthy traditional food sources. Tribes are combining modern science, traditional ecologic knowledge, and advocacy to work for water quality standards that are protective of traditional lifestyles, to restore habitat that is free from toxic pollutants, and to implement pollution control measures and green chemistry alternatives in tribal enterprises and communities to prevent the release of chemicals of concern into the environment.

EPA joined with other federal, state, tribal, local, and nonprofit partners to form the Columbia River Toxics Reduction Working Group in 2005. The purpose of the Working Group was to better coordinate toxics work across the Columbia River Basin and share information. The overall goal was to reduce toxics in the Basin and prevent further contamination. This goal includes reducing toxics in the plants and animals that people eat and ensuring the survival, reproduction, and growth of fish and wildlife in the Basin. One of the first actions of the Working Group was the development of the “State of the Columbia River Report for Toxics” that was published in January 2009. The Working Group then published the “Columbia River Basin Toxics Reduction Action Plan” in September 2012. The Action Plan provides more detail on the specific actions that are needed to prevent and reduce toxics from entering the Basin’s waters. This presentation will provide the background on actions leading up to the formation of the Working Group along with a description of the Working Group and its major work products. It will also discuss work that is on-going in the Columbia River Basin to prevent and reduce toxics. Finally, it will discuss the direction for further actions and next steps to achieve those actions.

As a member of the Puget Sound Ecosystem Monitoring Program (PSEMP), the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife has tracked toxic contaminants in Puget Sound’s food web since 1989. This Toxics in Biota group has reported on the status and trends of a wide range of contaminants, in a broad group of species including Pacific salmon, Pacific herring, rockfish, English sole, Dungeness crab, plankton, blue mussels, and herring embryos. The PSEMP Toxic in Biota team has worked in partnership with NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center Ecotoxicology Program to develop a toolbox for monitoring the exposure of species to toxic contaminants, and also the harmful effects of such exposure. This talk focuses on contaminants of greatest concern and provides three examples of their extent and magnitude in Puget Sound’s food web. Status and trends metrics are compared with thresholds of deleterious effects to inform the development of recovery goals for Puget Sound.

The California Safer Consumer Product (green chemistry) regulations were formally proposed in July 2012 to implement the requirements of Assembly Bill 1897 (September 29, 2008). The regulations specify an iterative process to identify and implement safer alternatives to listed chemicals of concern in consumer products. The Department of Toxic Substances Control will identify chemicals of concern and designate priority products for further evaluation. Manufacturers of priority products will be required to notify the Department and conduct a life-cycle alternatives analysis to determine how best to limit the exposures to and adverse impacts on public health and the environment. Following the analysis, the Department, through regulatory action, will require implementation of feasible alternatives that maximize protection. The scope of these regulations is very broad and the requirements are expected to have a major impact on businesses that manufacture or import products offered for sale in California.

Scott Butner: What Happens to the Whales? A Case Study of Anticipating the Environmental Consequences of Emerging Green Technologies (VIEW PRESENTATION)

Environmental lifecycle analysis (LCA) is often touted as a robust approach to insuring that sustainability considerations are taken into account while making business, policy or design decisions that could potentially impact the environment. But LCA often proves to be insufficient or inconclusive as a tool when dealing with emerging or pre-commercial technologies. Emerging technologies often present significant uncertainties regarding the relevant parameters including technical operating conditions, consumer use patterns for the new technology, or other consequential impacts that may result from the disruptive nature of the technology being studied. In these cases, new approaches to LCA (often called “consequential LCA”) must be brought to bear on the problem, along with other means for insuring that well-informed decisions are made.

This presentation will examine the case of marine hydrokinetic technology, a set of promising emerging technologies for producing renewable energy from wave and tidal forces. Despite their enormous promise for producing renewable electricity, the pre-commercial status of these technologies present some unique challenges in siting, permitting, and understanding the potential environmental consequences of their widespread adoption. The efforts to site a tidal power project in Admiralty Inlet will be used to illustrate the problems of making informed decisions under scientific uncertainty.